Book Image

Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React - Second Edition

By : Sebastian Grebe
Book Image

Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React - Second Edition

By: Sebastian Grebe

Overview of this book

React and GraphQL, when combined, provide you with a very dynamic, efficient, and stable tech stack to build web-based applications. GraphQL is a modern solution for querying an API that represents an alternative to REST and is the next evolution in web development. This book guides you in creating a full-stack web application from scratch using modern web technologies such as Apollo, Express.js, Node.js, and React. First, you’ll start by configuring and setting up your development environment. Next, the book demonstrates how to solve complex problems with GraphQL, such as abstracting multi-table database architectures and handling image uploads using Sequelize. You’ll then build a complete Graphbook from scratch. While doing so, you’ll cover the tricky parts of connecting React to the backend, and maintaining and synchronizing state. In addition to this, you’ll also learn how to write Reusable React components and use React Hooks. Later chapters will guide you through querying data and authenticating users in order to enable user privacy. Finally, you’ll explore how to deploy your application on AWS and ensure continuous deployment using Docker and CircleCI. By the end of this web development book, you'll have learned how to build and deploy scalable full-stack applications with ease using React and GraphQL.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Building the Stack
5
Section 2: Building the Application
14
Section 3: Preparing for Deployment

Chapter 10: Real-Time Subscriptions

The GraphQL application programming interface (API) we have built is very advanced, as is the frontend. In the previous chapter, we introduced server-side rendering (SSR) to our application. We provided the user with a lot of information through the news feed, chats, and profile pages. The problem we are facing now, however, is that the user currently has to either refresh the browser or we have set a pollInterval property to Apollo Hooks to keep the display up to date. A better solution is to implement Apollo subscriptions through WebSockets. This allows us to refresh the user interface (UI) of the user with the newest user information in real time without manual user interaction or polling.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Using GraphQL with WebSockets
  • Implementing Apollo subscriptions
  • JWT authentication with subscriptions
  • Notifications with Apollo subscriptions